Star Trek: Discovery - Far from Home Review

DIS "Far from Home"

In the surreal time travel sequence from Star Trek 4: The Voyage Home, each member of the Enterprise bridge crew's plaster-casted faces are shown melding into each other as they slingshot backward in time. While not going as far, the opening of "Far from Home" reminded me of that, as each member of the Discovery bridge crew's faces are shown in semi-abstract montage, having travelled forward in time. And the episode as a whole is all about Team Disco taking care of the basic survival of the ship and crew in unfamiliar environs, as both are hurting in the fallout of last season's finale.

"That Hope is You" was an episode of counterintuitive choices and a stew of different genres and tones. "Far from Home" is animated by a much more schematic Trekkian approach, nothing more, nothing less. Gotta fix the ship by plugging quantum A into phlebotinum B, and deal with a sad little king of a sad little hill. You can call it irony, but the wacko move of moving forward 900+ years into the future has de-complicating the show; without Red Angels, space signals, Klingon wars and/or sleeper agents to reckon with, the mission is survival and organic exploration of how to thrive after the apocalypse.

The shipbound characters deal with a perfunctory ticking clock: parasitic ice that is talked up a lot but doesn't really do anything distinctive. Cue Paul Stamets wrongheadedly working around his pain while Jett Reno cajoles and comforts him (more Reno cannot be a bad thing, and hopefully she'll be a more consistent presence this season). Later, as Discovery is about to be lacerated by the ice, Burnham shows up for a save with a tractor beam, and says the events of last week's episode were a year ago. But before that, Saru, Tilly, and eventually Mirror Georgiou set out to deal with the locals.

This part of the episode (framed with Western iconography of swinging Space Saloon doors) resembles theater. Not only in terms of a single set where a drama plays out, but in the nature of that drama functioning almost as a microcosmic pantomime of Discovery's situation. You have Saru and Tilly representing the Federation's thoughtful idealism, Georgiou the antithesis of might makes right, Zareh as a prototypical warlord taking advantage of the power vacuum, and the meek Coridanites as the everybeings looking for something to believe in. One clue is the pat fashion in which the bartender is so immediately impressed with Saru demanding Georgiou not kill Zareh (though that didn't save his henchmen).

While there's nothing particularly amiss, "Far from Home" follows the standard Star Trek paradigm of ship in danger/away team in danger and doesn't massively stand out, lacking extra paprika on that sandwich. 5/10.

Stray observations:

- Rachael Ancheril as Nhan is a regular this season? Very interesting.

- The Coridan species seen here looked very different (like they had xenomorph face-huggers permanently affixed on their faces) in "Demons", an Enterprise episode I just watched on the Randomized Rewatch. Their appearance here is based on what they looked like in a different Enterprise episode.